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The day I am writing this, I am sick. I was supposed to go to the Polish Consulate to do a visa application this morning, as I will be teaching at one of our partner Universities for a week there next month within the Erasmus Exchange Program. I woke up with a runny nose, sore throat, aching muscles and fever. Actually there were the signs that I was catching a cold or a virus or something by Saturday but I thought I would get over that quickly. I did not. So I could not go to the consulate to do my application and I called work and told them that I would not be able to come to work today.

The Wife is Catholic, and I’m not. She’s raising the kids Catholic, though we’ve negotiated some boundaries on that.The Boy has a friend who is a Jehovah’s Witness, which occasioned the following discussion in the car on the way home from Mass. (I wasn’t there; this is according to TW.)TB: He doesn’t believe the same things I believe, but it’s still okay to be friends with him, right?TW: Of course! Good people believe all kinds of different things, and they’re still good people. Like I’m Catholic, and so are you, and so is TG, but Daddy is...

I don't hear it much from the faculty, but for a fair number of staff, one great thing about working for a college or university is commonly phrased along the lines of "well, at least I know they're not going to move my job to . . .[fill in the blank]".

In “The Fact Behind the Facts, or, How You Can Get It All Right and Still Get It All Wrong,” Philip Gerard, Chair of the Department of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington, tells the story of his first front-page byline. As a cub reporter he investigated an incident where a boy had pulled his girlfriend from a car fire and saved her life. Years later Gerard was still pleased when a guy in a bar asked if he’d written that car-fire piece.

One of my colleagues calls this month “Hatepril.” It’s an awful time. With the academic year in the final stretch, nearly everybody is fried. The faculty are tired and cranky, and not at their best; the students are tired and scared; the administrators are overscheduled to within inches of our lives.

I confess having a hesitation when deciding on the title of my post today. Should it be administrators OR teachers? Maybe even administrators VERSUS teachers? Of course the last alternative would be an exaggeration, but I dare you to say that it never felt that there was such a tension at your university. I went with the conjunction AND because in the end this is what I’d like to discuss: the relationship between these two groups of hard working people that make universities go round.

For the last four days, I have been driving a Chevrolet Volt which is a real electric car (different from the typical hybrid) with a back-up gas powered engine to charge the Lithium-Ion batteries when necessary. The “when necessary” is when you drive the Volt for more than 40 miles. It’s been very interesting and the future is clearly visible here. The car will be displayed on campus (courtesy of East Hills Chevrolet) as part of the University’s Earth Day activities, and the dealer also invited me to drive the car for a few days before it goes on display.